A personal wireless area network (WPAN) is a network used for communication among computing devices (for example, telephones and personal digital assistants, laptops and the like) close to one person. The devices may, or may not, belong to the person in question. The reach of a WPAN may be a few meters. WPANs may be used for intrapersonal communication among the personal devices themselves, or for connecting via an uplink to a higher level network and the Internet. Personal area networks may be wired with computer buses such as a universal serial bus (USB), FireWire and the like.
The IEEE 802.15.3 Task Group 3c (TG3c) which was formed in March 2005. TG3c is developing a millimeter-wave (mmWawe) based alternative physical layer (PHY) for the existing 802.15.3 Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) Standard 802.15.3-2003.
This mmWave WPAN may operate in a frequency band including 57-64 GHz unlicensed band defined by FCC 47 CFR 15.255. The millimeter-wave WPAN allows high coexistence, in a close physical spacing, with all other microwave systems in the 802.15 family of WPANs.
In addition, the millimeter-wave WPAN may allow very high data rate over 2 Gbit/s applications such as high speed internet access, streaming content download (e.g., video on demand, high-definition television (HDTV), home theater, etc.), real time streaming and wireless data bus for cable replacement for example, wireless display (WD).
However, unlike natural video where contents in frames are constantly moving, a synthetic personal computer (PC) video may include most of the time an unchanged video portion unless the user takes certain actions to change the PC view (e.g., move mouse, open a folder, open a file etc.). Such behavior may bring extremely bursty nature to the traffic pattern in that the size of the compressed video frame may vary dramatically over a short time scale. In addition, the synthetic video has very demanding delay requirements since the PC users expect invisible latency in PC response.
One way to accommodate such bursty traffic is to allocate sufficient channel time so that the peak data rate may be satisfied. Such scheme may lead to very poor channel utilization since most of time the channel is unutilized. On the other hand, a more dynamic way to deal with traffic variation is to adjust channel time allocation based on instantaneous traffic requirement. This scheme, however, requires explicit signaling with a piconet controller (PNC) to exchange channel time modification request and response, which may lead to increased latency in response to traffic dynamics. In addition, the channel time modification may only take effect in at least the next superframe. Moreover, there is a probability that channel time modification may not be fulfilled due to a busy schedule at the PNC, leading to unsatisfied delay performance.
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